Transcript For: Author Talk: #Hashtagactivism
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Transcript for: Author Talk: #HashtagActivism Hannah Nyren: Hi, everyone. Welcome to MIT Press Live! a new virtual event series, brought to you by The MIT Press. Hannah Nyren: My name is Hannah Nyren and I am the Digital Marketing Manager at The MIT Press and I will be your host for this series. Today, we are speaking with the authors of #HashtagActivism. Great, see you all today. How are you doing? Sarah J. Jackson: Great. Moya Bailey: Thanks for having well thanks for having us. Hannah Nyren: Yeah, I'm so glad that you all could join us. Hannah Nyren: I’m so glad you could join us. We're really excited about your book. And we're really excited to talk about it today. So, just to make sure everyone knows all about you guys, before we began. Could each of you go around and introduce yourself? Sarah J. Jackson: Sure, I'll go first. My name is Sarah Jackson, I'm a Presidential Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and I study media, social movements and particularly black and feminist activism. Moya Bailey: Hello everyone, my name is Moya Bailey. I'm an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Africana Studies and women's gender and sexuality studies that I'm really interested in how race, gender, and medicine come together in media. Brooke Foucault Welles: Hi everyone I'm Brooke Foucault Welles. I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and network science at Northeastern University. I study online communication networks and marginalized communities. Hannah Nyren: Great. So, does one of you want to tell us a little bit more about what this book is about? Brooke Foucault Welles: Sure, I can take that one. And so in #HashtagActivism we explore how marginalized communities have harnessed the power of the internet and Twitter in particular. In order to infiltrate and change public debate about topics that are of great importance to them. Brooke Foucault Welles: We specifically focus on race, gender, and their intersections and we use several different methods, including computational network analysis. Brooke Foucault Welles: Qualitative discourse analysis and historical analysis, along with responsible responses from activists themselves to really paint an in depth picture of how various contemporary hashtags have changed the issues we’re talking about and how we're talking about them. Hannah Nyren: Awesome. So, um, what inspired this book? What brought you all together to write it? Sarah J. Jackson: Yeah, thanks for asking that. So, it's actually a fun story Brooke and I, our offices used to be next door to each other. And I was at work, put on Twitter, which those things aren't mutually exclusive. Sarah J. Jackson: In early 2014 and so you have to kind of transport yourself back to early 2014. This was before, most Americans had seen or heard of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag it was before. Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Sarah J. Jackson: The New York City Police Department attempted a public relations campaign with a hashtag. They started a hashtag #MYNYPD Sarah J. Jackson: And they sent out a tweet that said, share your photos and videos with the New York City Police Department, with the hashtag #myNYPD Sarah J. Jackson: And we'll choose the best ones and share them to our Facebook and our Twitter account. Now of course in 2020 like hearing that we can all imagine how quickly, something like that could go down hill, but it's 2014 and people didn't quite have the savvy. And so what was fascinating. Was that immediately. Sarah J. Jackson: This hashtag that was started essentially by those with power by the New York City Police Department, which they even had provided a sample photo of what they wanted, which was a smiling tourist wearing and I love NYC hat in Times Square with police officers. Sarah J. Jackson: was overtaken by ordinary people first New Yorkers. And then, increasingly, people from all over the world and and talking about police brutality and sharing images of police brutality and not only contemporary cases but also historical cases, talking about the Amadou Diallo case talking about cases even earlier than that. And I thought, as somebody who studies the question of who has the power to shape the narrative... Sarah J. Jackson: When we talk about issues of inequality, when we talk about issues of race, when we talk about issues of identity. I thought this was a fascinating, fascinating case in which the people who theoretically we would always think, have the power, which are those in a more elite social position in this case, the police really lost control of this hashtag. Sarah J. Jackson: And it was overtaken by ordinary people telling their stories and sort of insisting on really reorienting and rethinking the role of police in society. So, I had walk next door to Brooke and said is there a way for us to study this because I am a qualitative scholar and I knew how to study it theoretically, and I knew how to do discourse analysis on what I was seeing people tweet, but I also knew that I was seeing millions of tweets. Sarah J. Jackson: Which is a huge data set and Brooke, because she's a network scientist had the skill and the tools. Sarah J. Jackson: To be able to sort of sit down and work with me on how to collect that data. And that was one of the first studies that we did prior to starting this book, and at the same time that was that was happening Moya, who is a digital humanist was studying issues of race, gender, feminism, the body, etc online and had particularly been studying the hashtag girls like us network which is a Hash. Hash tag network. We'll talk more about today... Sarah J. Jackson: That was started by Janet Mock for transwomen in particular to talk about their experiences and concerns and sort of build both a collective identity and a kind of body politic. So that's, that's where this all started. Hannah Nyren: That's amazing. It's so cool that you all were there, kind of at the beginning of this what I feel like has become a giant movement or at least a giant trend. Hannah Nyren: Um, so it's great that you all have the resources to put this together and to do the due diligence on the subject. Alright, so I'll let you take it from here. I know you all have a lot to talk about. Sarah J. Jackson: Sure. Thanks. Thanks, Hannah. So I'm just going to start out for our audience members who maybe aren't familiar, or haven't read the book yet. I'm just going to read a brief excerpt introducing the concept of hashtag activism why we think it's important... Sarah J. Jackson: And then I will also read a very brief piece of our chapter titled from “Ferguson to Falcon Heights,” which is one of several chapters in the book that looks at the sort of corpus of Black Lives Matter networks, which includes the names of people who were killed incases of police brutality and other cases of anti black violence and many other name places, etc. So I'll read that and then we'll have a little bit of a discussion thereafter. Sarah J. Jackson: Okay, so, #HashtagActivism, a term that first appeared in news coverage in 2011 describes the creation and proliferation of online activism stamped with a hashtag. Sarah J. Jackson: We argue that this online activism leads to material effects in the digital and physical worlds. While #HashtagActivism is a uniquely 21st century phenomenon. There is something familiar about the goals of those using Twitter to push for social change. Sarah J. Jackson: Indeed, ordinary people challenging redefining and changing the terms of public debate is one of the most enduring and crucial characteristics of democracy. Sarah J. Jackson: Much of the discourse related to U.S progress from the abolition of slavery to the sexual revolution was rooted in narratives created on the margins of society. Sarah J. Jackson: Counter Publix, as we call them in this book or the alternative networks of debate created by marginalized members of the public have always played an important role in highlighting and legitimizing the experiences of those on the margins. Sarah J. Jackson: Even as they push for integration and change in mainstream spaces. Sarah J. Jackson: So I'm just going to skip quite a few port pages forward and read a little bit from the beginning of our chapter “From Ferguson to Falcon Heights,” where we talk about the Ferguson hashtag in particular. Sarah J. Jackson: As we find elsewhere. The story of what happened in Ferguson began to circulate on Twitter. Sarah J. Jackson: First through personal accounts from Michael Brown's neighbors after he was killed, whose tweets set the stage for how the larger activist narrative around the events of August 9 would evolve. Sarah J. Jackson: The story was pushed along and the network enlarged by members of the local and national black community and public sphere. Sarah J. Jackson: Together, these Twitter users help spread the story to a range of networks documented on the ground efforts and bullied called for aid from General, the general public, as Justice continued to be waylaid Sarah J. Jackson: Soon increasing online attention to the events in Ferguson and particularly the conflicts developing around unarmed protesters journalist and the police became unignorable even in the most mainstream of spaces.